UNSEEN HANDS
CHAPTER I
TERROR
IT was a week since Julian Chalmers's tragic young death and the fourth day after the funeral, and yet the odor of dying flowers and the chill gloom which only so mournful a function can radiate seemed still to cling about the spacious room. It bore an air of unfamiliarity, too, which was due in part to the fact that the massive old furniture had not been replaced with the exactitude which its long-established position warranted.
The little faded woman who appeared noiselessly on the threshold and peered within much as a mouse might have done seemed at once to sense the general atmosphere and perceive its source. She entered, and as a light footfall sounded upon the stairs she laid her slender arms about a huge old arm chair and strove with all her frail strength to move it toward the table.
"Oh, Aunt Effie, what are you doing?" The words were more an awestruck exclamation than a question, and a young girl halted in the doorway as had the older woman at first. She was small and lithe; a dark, gypsy-like creature who would have been pretty in other circumstances. Now her big soft eyes were deeply encircled, and her clear dark skin chalkily pallid.
"Peters and Gerda have been sadly careless in rearranging the room, dear. I suppose I must not scold them at—at such a time, but I should have seen to it myself." The little lady's voice was low and as colorless as her personality. "You know your stepfather always likes this chair nearer the light."
"Well, do let Peters attend to it later and come into the dining-room!" It was not impatience but entreaty which sounded in the seemingly impulsive cry. "It's—it's simply horrible in here! Haven't father and the boys come down yet? Rannie's always late!"
"You have no patience with his infirmity, Nan, child," her aunt responded in gentle reproof as she followed the girl into the brilliantly lighted dining-room, where at one end a round table had been laid for six. "Remember he cannot run up and down the stairs as quickly as you."
"Oh, I did not mean to be unkind!" Nan Chalmers spoke in quick remorse, and her eyes darkened as she added in a half whisper, "We should none of us be unkind to each other, should we? We can not tell which will be the next to be taken!"
"It is the Lord's will." Miss Effie's soft, resigned voice was lost in the clear, flippant tones of a young man and the deep rumble of that of an older one as Richard Lorne and his eldest living step-son entered the room together.
"Remember, Eugene, not to speak of this to your aunt—" Lorne broke off abruptly as he caught sight of Miss Effie standing beside the cold hearth.
"Oh, Aunt Effie knows as well as we do that things always run in three's," Eugene responded nonchalantly enough as he moved toward the table; but his light eyes wavered and a slight flush mounted to his sleek golden hair and receded, leaving him more pale than before. He turned to the younger sister, who was so unlike him in type, and asked with a flippancy which the quivering of his rather weak chin belied: "Why so tragic. Nan? It'll be me, not you; and the infernal jinx that is over this house will have to work quick, for next month I'll be twenty-five—"
"Silence!" His stepfather's round reddened face puffed out in anger, and his close-clipped gray mustache fairly bristled. "If you have no heart, at least preserve a semblance of decency and do not jest about—about matters which have bowed all our heads in grief!"
His tone grew husky toward the last, and his slightly prominent blue eyes filled as he turned away.
Nan laid a cool little hand over his.
"Don't mind Gene, father. He's only trying to cover up his own feelings; I know him!" She spoke with infinite tenderness; and it was evident that between the girl and her stepfather a very real affection existed. "Come, shall we wait for the other two?"
"I'm here!" A thin, high, whining voice with an indescribably sarcastic undernote in it replied to the question; and a distorted, humpbacked figure came forward. Randall, the youngest of the Chalmers children, was a boy of about eighteen, and dark like Nan, who was two years his senior; but there the resemblance ceased. Her witching charm seemed in him to be changed to a malevolent humor, and his thin lips were twisted, by past pain perhaps, into a perpetually sardonic leer. In his correct, somber mourning clothes, cleverly built to conceal as much as possible of his infirmity, he nevertheless made one think irresistibly of a jester in motley as he slid sinuously into his seat at the table and made an impish grace at his sister's face.
Richard Lorne turned to the impassive butler.
"Dinner, Peters. We shall not wait for Miss Chalmers."
Soup was almost finished before the beauty of the family appeared. Christine was twenty-two and resembled Eugene in her coloring save that her blondness was of a colder, more brilliant type, and there was no hint of weakness in her exquisite, perfectly chiseled features. She carried herself with the assured air of one conscious of her beauty; and her elaborate crêpe gown made the more simple mourning of her sister and aunt appear dowdy by comparison.
"I've been frightfully busy," she announced as she seated herself. "It's a bore to try to separate the sheep from the goats; but one simply must know whom merely to send cards to, and who must be replied to personally. Why do people send condolences, anyway?"
"Usually to be on the safe side in case they might have been remembered in the will." The cripple looked up with a shrewd twinkle in his sunken eyes.
"I hope, my dear, that you have not touched the pile of correspondence on the desk in the library." Miss Effie Meade glanced at her butterfly niece in nervous deprecation. "I have it all nicely arranged for Gene; he says that he will attend to it this evening."
Christine tossed her head.
"I meant my own personal mail, Aunt Effie. I assure you, it's quite enough for me to take on my shoulders."
Gene opened his lips as if to retort, but evidently thought better of it and with a shrug devoted himself to his fish. The dinner progressed in silence to its close; but when Peters at a nod from Richard Lorne had placed the coffee upon the table and departed little Miss Effie glanced about and said timidly:
"We—we mustn't go on like this, you know. The—the loss of our dear ones—". She put her handkerchief for a moment to her brimming eyes. "To have my poor sister and her dear son taken from us so suddenly and with so short a space of time between is heartrending, but it is the Lord's will and we must not complain. If we go on as we have been, we shall have Peters talking to the other servants about us. We are acting as if—as if—"
"As if we were afraid!" Randall, the cripple, thrust himself forward suddenly in his chair. "Must we be hypocrites eternally? We grieve, of course, each in our own way, and that concerns only our own souls if we have any, but there is something else back in the minds of all of us and that is fear! Even you, even Dad! Why, look around the table! Aren't we each asking ourselves: 'Will I be the next? Will I be the next?' Do we believe it was the Lord's will?"
"This is madness!" Richard Lorne put down his coffee-cup, which he had held suspended in a shaking hand while he listened as if hypnotized to his step-son's harangue. "Let us hear no more of this, this wild raving! I believe you are losing your mind! You know that the deaths of both your mother and brother were due to perfectly natural causes: accidents. If you do not still that mad tongue of yours I will have you put away!"
He strode from the room, and Randall laughed shrilly.
"You see? Can't bear to have his innermost thoughts brought to the light of day!"
But the others were not listening. Instead they were glancing about as he had bade them; and each read in the eyes of the others the nameless thing which had been locked in their own breasts for an interminable week.
In all eyes save those of their mother's sister, Miss Effie; they shone through her tears with an almost fanatical light. After a moment of silence she rose and put her arm tenderly about the cripple's shoulders.
"Come, Rannie, you are all overwrought, and the fever mustn't rise again. You know what pain it always brings. Lie on the couch in my room and let me read to you for a while."
The boy flung her off impatiently.
"Let me alone, Aunt Effie! I'm not a child, I tell you! I'm wise; wiser than all of you!"
Nevertheless, he suffered her to lead him from the room and preceded her when, on the threshold, she turned.
"You'll find the light just right, I think, over the desk, Gene," she said. "Don't work too late, dear. There are so many letters, and I can find time to help you in the morning."
As the door closed Christine began to sob hysterically.
"I'm going to get out of this dreadful house to-morrow!" she cried. "I've felt ever since p-poor Julian was found as if s-something were hanging over my h-head! I'm going to Dorothy Landis's and stay; I'd go to-night if I c-could!"
"Sure, run away," Gene sneered coldly. "If it is your turn next you'd probably slip on a banana-peel or get in a taxi accident before you reached the Landis place! Stick around like a sport, but watch your step and see what our jinx has in store for you!"
"Don't say such dreadful things. Gene dear; you're almost as bad as Rannie." Nan raised her white, serious face and looked straight into his. "You know you don't believe in evil spirits any more than I do. There is no use in denying that I've felt just as Cissie has all this last week; but it may be that we are all just nervous and apt to imagine things. Why, even poor father showed it to-night when Rannie burst out like that! If we could all be as stolid and calm as—as Peters, for instance."
Gene laughed.
"The impeccable Peters is carrying a newly acquired rabbit's foot! Fact. It fell out of his pocket when he stooped to pick up Dad's cane this morning. Nobody saw it but me, and I thought best not to make any inquiries just then. I've no doubt that Marcelle has one of those little Rintintin figures concealed somewhere about her person at this moment; and Jane and Gerda must be sporting whatever their particular fetishes are, too. I'm not trying to be funny!" he added. "I'm just showing you which way the wind is blowing."
"They are stupid, ignorant things," Nan commented. "But I've heard that fear is contagious; and although I don't believe in a jinx, I do believe that our thoughts can work on the people around us for good or bad. Now, suppose that one of us got this fear—which would be ridiculous if it were not so horrible!—and communicated it to the rest?"
"Nothing doing," Gene replied. "If a whole lot of people think the same thing it's bound to be true; not come true because they believe it, but be true from the first. You wait and see what happens next!"
Christine moaned, and regardless of her coiffure burrowed her head still deeper into her folded arms upon the table.
"If we'd try to think sanely for a minute, we'd realize how impossible any connection between mother's death and Julian's could be." Nan spoke decidedly, but her voice trembled and lowered as she mentioned those who had gone. "Dear mother ran a needle in her hand and blood-poison followed; that might happen to anyone, there is nothing strange about it."
"No, but there was something strange about the infection that set in and spread in spite of what the best specialists in the country could do; you heard them say that, themselves!" Gene retorted. "And I suppose it wasn't queer that when Jule's razor slipped while he was shaving it should just nick the jugular vein? Well, I'm going in and start upon those beastly letters. Thank the Lord, Aunt Effie got them sorted for me!"
"I'm going to pack!" Cissie jumped up as he departed. "Of course you won't go while Tad lives right next door and can run in and out any hour of the day, but I—"
"But you!" Nan interrupted hotly. "You want to go because the sorrowful atmosphere of this house won't be conducive to the comfort and pleasure of Farley Drew! Because he knows that he isn't welcomed here by any one but you and Gene! He'll probably be welcomed as your guest by the Landises; they don't know him as I do!"
"You're only a child." Cissie smoothed her crêpe draperies complacently. "What could you know of a man of the world like Farley?"
"I know that he has led Gene into all the trouble he was ever in, and poor Julian, too! That's enough for me!" Nan poured herself a cup of the cold coffee. "How you can be so stupid, Cissie!—"
But Cissie had trailed from the room, and her younger sister was left to her own thoughts.
In the smoking-room back of the library Richard Lorne was closeted with Samuel Titheredge of Titheredge, Gore & Wells, attorneys and counselors-at-law.
Samuel was as long and lean and lantern-jawed as Lorne was short and stout and round-faced; and the two had been friends since their university days thirty years before. It was with the freedom, then, of absolute camaraderie that the lawyer advised his client.
"Dick, don't be an ass! Go to the authorities with what, I should like to know? Sad as the affair is, I can't see that there is anything strange about it. It isn't at all unusual for two members of one family to die of different causes within a month of each other. Buck up, and if there is anything left in your private cellar take a swig of it before you go to bed. Why, man, there isn't even a coincidence in the affair! If you take such a cock-and-bull story to Headquarters, do you know what will happen? You'll get a lot of derisive notoriety that you're not looking for; and afterward when somebody proposes coming to you with a nice tidy investment, somebody else will tap his forehead significantly and suggest another broker!"
"But I say that there is a coincidence, Sam," Lorne retorted doggedly. "I may be an ass; but I've lived with this thing in my mind ever since the poor boy was discovered lying there dead in the bathroom, and I've had time to think it over. The deaths were both on the face of them the result of accidents; but they might have been deliberately designed to appear as accidents. Do you get me? That needle which pierced my poor wife's hand might have been doctored beforehand; and anyone knowing the state of Julian's mind might have made a sudden noise behind him at a critical moment when the razor was near the artery. It would have taken a devilish clever mind—"
"Or an insane one." The attorney uncrossed his long legs and added casually: "Your theory presupposes, then, that it was an inside job?"
For a long moment the two men stared at each other; and then Samuel with a shrug settled back in his chair once more.
You see, Dick, you're going nutty about this thing. Just get the poor lad's estate in order and I'll have the necessary papers ready for you to sign. Then go away somewhere; try to amuse yourself and forget."
"You have the papers ready to-morrow morning, then, I have a complete statement and accounting for every penny that his mother left him already prepared; I was going to turn it over to him, in any event." Lorne paused and added: "I suppose if another coincidence of the same kind occurs in this family within a short time and doesn't involve me as the central figure, I shall be able to convince you that there is something in my hallucination, after all."
"I should be sorry to hear of such an occurrence," the attorney responded slowly. "But if it should happen I—yes, I'm inclined to think that I might be able to take it a bit more seriously than I can at present. If you had a single clue, a single shred of evidence to support your crazy idea—"
He paused as Lorne held up a warning hand. Steps were approaching over the bare library-floor, and the inevitable knock upon the connecting door was followed by a cough of deprecation.
"Come in, Gene," Lorne called resignedly.
"It's about one of these con—one of these letters of condolence, sir." Gene hastened to correct himself, and with a far greater respect than he exhibited toward his step-father in private. He meant to appear always at his best before the attorney who held the family fortunes, if not in his grasp, at least under his supervision. "It's from a woman—er—the stationery is not quite like that used by any of our acquaintances, and I can't make out the signature—'Mabelle' something."
"Let me see it!" Lorne demanded with an almost unprecedented irascibility in his tones. Gene passed over the table a flamboyant lavender envelope, and did not betray by a flutter of his downcast yellow eyelashes that he had observed not only his stepfather's sudden agitation but the attorney's start of surprise.
"Ill reply to this one; I see it is addressed to me—" Lorne was beginning when a terrific crash in the library made him start from his chair.
"Why, It's the portrait! The portrait of grandfather that hangs directly over the desk where I've been at work! It must weigh tons!" Gene had wheeled about, and his squeal of terror died in his throat as he turned again to face the other two, his own countenance convulsed with horror at the thought he could not utter.
For a moment they stood spellbound and then leaped past him and through the open door. The life-sized portrait with its massive gilt frame had crashed down over the desk and the space where Gene had been sitting but a minute before, splintering the heavy chair to matchwood.
"If Gene had not come to us with that letter just when he did—" Samuel paused.
"The third coincidence would be complete," Lorne finished for him. "He would have been crushed to atoms. Beginning to believe in my crazy idea a little bit, Sam? Beginning to see that there is some damnable reason for it all?"
"I'm willing now to admit the coincidence, Dick," the attorney said cautiously. "But the legal mind is not adapted to ghost-hunting; and I'd like to address your attention to the strands of wire cable which held the picture to the wall. They have been hacked almost through!"